Cleaning Up Scanned Photos
in Photoshop
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© Copyright 2008, Impact Video Productions.
Photos will most often need a bit of touching up once they are scanned and imported into a photo editing software application. In this tutorial we will touch up a digital photo that was scanned from a 35mm slide. We will use Adobe Photoshop CS to demonstrate a couple of ways to accomplish the same task, but any paint or photo program will accomplish the same end results with roughly the same tools. 
Looking closely at the sky and the white swirls of the lighthouse on the left, you’ll see dark specks introduced while the color transparency was in development or from dirt or dust within the camera when the picture was taken. Scratches on the film surface sometimes appear as light or dark streaks, depending on the type of film and film processing. The technique described in this tutorial will work for either dust spots or scratches, whether light or dark.
The close up on the right shows just a few of the areas to clean up.

First, select the Clone Stamp tool from the toolbar. In the tool options palette, select the following:

Technique #2
The Clone Stamp tool works very well on simple patterns and textures within photographs. The second method of cleaning up scanned photography is a better technique to use when correcting complex areas with a lot of details, such as a face, an intricate quilt, perhaps a stuffed bookshelf behind your subject, or lush greenery as in the photo below. In such cases it’s best to use a combination of the Dust & Scratches filter and the erase tool. 

Let’s use this technique now.
Technique #3
The Healing Brush tool–new to Photoshop since version 7.0–is the third technique for correcting imperfections introduced in scanning. Like the clone tool, it uses sampled areas as the basis for making the corrections, matching their texture, lighting, transparency, and shading. The result is a seamless repair of the image. It’s ideal for softening wrinkles and ridding blemishes.

Here’s how to use it on the photo on the right:
In the options bar, set:
Determine the target sample area and Alt-click it to set it. Click and drag in the areas that need repair.

The sampled pixels replace the original pixels each time you release the mouse button.

The photo below shows the result of the Healing Brush tool and color-correction.

The Clone Stamp tool allows you to sample pixels from one location and place them in another location of the same or separate photograph. For instance, you could duplicate all of the pixels of the lighthouse above to make an exact copy (clone) of the lighthouse within the same photograph. The result would be an image containing two lighthouses, as in the photo on the right.

For our purposes, we are using the Clone Stamp tool to replace spots caused by dirt and dust. To do this:
You now have a blurred background image on one layer and your original image on a layer above it. But you’re not done yet.

In the Tool Options bar, select:
Click or click and drag on problem areas and repeat until all are removed. Flatten the image into one layer by selecting Flatten Image from the Layers pull-down on the menu bar or from the fly-out menu on the Layers palette.
Photo with end result of the blur and erase technique plus other improvements not included in this tutorial
Technique #1
Let’s begin with the tool most often used in photo touch-ups of this kind – the Clone Stamp tool.
Now blur the background layer using the Dust & Scratches filter.